Won a turtle-counting award yesterday. Yes, sir. It's three of us sharing the big wooden plaque. (We three think we, Jan, Janice, and I, were chosen for our spokesmodel qualities. Why else would Donald, Paul, Cam, Nancy, Harry and Hugh have been left out? Not cute enough, maybe.)
Why is this on a sailing blog? Because I was reminded, during yesterday's powerpoint presentation, of how much I like being on the water. You have to be on water to count turtles, at least the kinds of turtles the Conservation Authority cares about, and I like being on water. Calm or just slightly ripply river water. In a canoe. The paddler is in charge of the canoe. No matter what a skipper says, it is the wind that is in charge of a sailboat.

From what I've seen.

Splicing is fairly fun. It's a little like weaving rugs, maybe more like macramé. It requires cool tools and patience. Since I weave, spin, braid rugs, knit, I am a big fan of activities that require cool tools and patience. I bought Harry a red rigging knife/awl for St. Valentine's Day, and it's a little (okay, a lot) like when he bought a router on my birthday. I may end up borrowing it, especially if my new dream comes true. New dream: that Harry indeed sails among the BVIs and I stay ashore one of them, who cares which?, and pick up rope-splicing jobs. It could work...

Big talk around the kitchen table last night about sailing among the British Virgin Islands. Maybe, they think, it will be an all-guy trip. My services as nauseated and frightened galley cook will not be required in that case. Those who want to sail get to sail, and those who want to stay clear of pirates and storms get to stay clear of...
This is promising.

Stars align...
1) Yesterday, I decided once and for all this blog should be about sailing.
2) Yesterday, I directed Anna to the blog in a pathetic bid for readers. Anna was surprised to see that I began it in 2002. That's before blogging was cool, right? Just a minute, though - is blogging cool? I guess it is okay if you comment, but I'm afraid of what you are going to say. I should add that the number of posts per year must be some sort of bottom-of-the-barrel record. That's something.
3) Yesterday, I promised to donate my monstrous old metal filing cabinet to the local Cultural Coalition. You think this is unrelated, but wait. That involved cleaning it out. It would be nice to simply dump it all into a sack and make a burnt offering to the gods of accumulation, but I suspect there may be land deeds in it and, what's this?, yes, an important 1968 Sunday School diploma. I could take it to church meetings to add authenticity to myself when foisting crackpot ideas on our unimpressed vestry. But I digress. In the sifting, I found this photo.
It is of my sailor brother and said Anna in 2002, and was taken just after the sailing adventure of which I wrote at the time. Look at how they survived unscathed. Smiling. Unafraid.
Maybe sailing isn't so bad.

Although I consistently purchase books with titles like Death at Sea and Terror on the Waves as Christmas presents for my husband, each one only makes him more keen to try his hand at the tiller of something bigger than his 11-ft homemade skiff.
Time for a new tack, as the sailors say.
I booked us a blustery end-of-January weekend trip to downtown Chicago. The Strictly Sail Boat Show. Discount passes for early booking, cheap train ticket, discounted room a few snowy blocks away. If that didn't take the wind out of his sails...

But no. The city was fantastic, and so was the show. Why, there were seminars every 45 minutes on Sailing Basics, Cold Water Survival, Line Splicing, Keeping Your Eggs Fresh (I think that one was called The Essential Galley), Topless Sports Moms (that one was Sailing in Northern Italy), and my favourite, Two Royal Marines Sail the Northwest Passage and Run Out of Fresh Water. Boy, though, that last one did nothing to dissuade our man. The stars in his eyes shone bright. We may soon be living in the high arctic in this:

Must find a copy of The Franklin Expedition. For all the good it will do.

Just because I don't look busy from afar - there's no commute, for instance, for the neighbours to witness - or from close up - never stick my tongue out of the side of my mouth, for instance, when editing - those around me are fooled into thinking I have time to tear down and rebuild their chimneys. Does this happen to you? It's only me, isn't it? I knew it. And if you said no to such a request, they'd accept it, right? Yup, it's only me. They wouldn't laugh at you if you offered to write out the instructions for mixing the mortar. They wouldn't say, "No, no, just come when you can."
I've got to start sticking that tongue out.

Hey, know what can get a person updating his/her blog? Having something else that needs doing. It's just like scrubbing the floor when there's the letter to the relatives out west to write. My *letter to the relatives* is a book in two languages, one not mine, that I must type. So here I am, not typing it. Typing this.

You know, I'd forgotten I even started a blog, even had one out there, until I read an article in Utne recently about blogs. "Oh right, I have one," I said. Bit my bottom lip and looked off. Ten months is a very long time between updates, but Saskabush seems to be in about the same boat. (That's a nearly unrelated aside just to make me feel better.) We'll call this blog my stepping stone to bigger things, other sites with information so recent you'll gasp. But I'll be back.

How did they get so picky anyway? They were raised by someone who eats cheese rinds.

I am concerned about cheese rinds. It comes from travel, of course. Normally, I buy cheese from SW Ont grocery stores and there is nothing like a rind on any of it. Plastic is a little like a rind, but inedible. It doesn't tempt me. Real rinds, that you find at the specialty counter or in Europe (better to go to Europe than to a SW Ont specialty counter) are so delicious. I might say I am hooked on them. Yum. But my daughters, world travellers who have seen somewhere wheels of cheese in warehouses, warn me that the rinds are not to be eaten. They are the part that sits on the floor. They are, certainly, thrown out - cheese rinds always figure in fiction in lists of garbage if lists of garbage are needed for dramatic purpose. And fiction has to come from somewhere. I might have to throw out these cheese rinds from Parma. Ah, but they look so good.

Just got back from Italy. The differences between Florence, Ontario (pop. 200), and Florence, Italy (pop. 500,000), are staggering. The stage backdrop curtain at the former's community centre painted by Miss Emma Kerby really does pale next to, for instance, the Birth of Venus. The similarity is this: there are the same number of parking spaces in the two Florences.

Ooo, posting is easier now. But that's not what I'm here to say. I'm here to tell you about hearing things wrong. I would be an expert on this topic if I were actually AWARE of all the times I've heard things wrong, so I won't claim that but just tell you about this morning at 5. We were loading chickens, five to a crate. Three (chickens) were left over - sounds like a math question. We solved Problem A by allowing ("Yeah, 'allowing'," say the chickens) six chickens in three of the crates. I moved to open one with my left hand, squawking indignant hurricane of feet and feathers in my right, when Anna said, "Be careful; that one's full of spiders."
Spiders? In the crate? How big could they possibly be? Wouldn't one or two of the five chickens have eaten them already? Not hungry at 5 a.m.? But still.
"Spiders?" I asked. "No, fighters," Anna enunciated patiently and clearly. "That one's full of fighters."
It was full of baleful glarers once the sixth was added.

It's been a long time. It's spring now. The storms are electrical, not icy. I've spent too much time looking at what other people have written and have jotted little of my own. A book title came to mind last night: Trying to Forget the Merchant of Venice.

We're all set. We have the ingredients. If this ice storm develops as they say it will and the power goes out and the roads slick over, we'll be eating stew cooked atop the cellar wood stove. And some sort of pan bread, maybe dumplings. So don't worry about us.

When someone writes he is working from a laptop, do you picture exactly that? Him perched near the edge of a kitchen chair (chrome with the cracked black rubber booties at the leg ends and that cross-hatched grimy blue-with-the-flowers vinyl seat and back cover with just the one slice top left with its fluffy whiteish edges revealing tan/orange foam), black laptop made a bit shabby by the scene and balanced precariously on just that, the top of his lap? He's hunched a bit?
Do you?

Oh, so kind. It's been two months since my last posting, forgivemefatherforIhavesinned, and the blogger blurb says, "Welcome back, Lawrene," the nice granny blog in town who is so very pleased to see you no matter how infrequently you can visit, as opposed to the granny blog next door who, even if you blog every day purses its lips and says, "Of course you're busy with your own life and don't have time for your old granny blog. She doesn't have long on this web, but you're busy. They'll shut her down because you don't have a minute to visit, but that's okay ... because you're busy."

What a day! Should I tell you about it? Well, sure. You’re not talking much. Haven’t signed the guestbook or anything (hint, hint) so it’s up to me.
Soooo, yesterday we kicked things off by getting up at four a.m. to catch and crate chickens. Roosters. You probably don’t even have chickens around to catch; you live in a city maybe or watched Chicken Run (I haven’t seen it) and became a vegetarian. We, however, raise ’em and catch ’em and I won’t tell you what happens to them next. It is not, although we tell them it is, a nice cruise.
Chickens caught and in the truck to, um, Carnival Cruises, I drove to one town to drop off a trumpeter for band practice then backtracked to Glencoe to be at the International Plowing (they don’t spell it Ploughing) Match for the 8 a.m. bucket set-up. Buckets? Yes, a handful of us booked off the day to sell Home Hardware buckets for the Rotary Club until about 4 p.m. Sounds easy, but like the cruise story we tell the chickens, lies were involved. The Rotary organizers told us these buckets sell like hotcakes and are all gone by noon. I pictured standing in a shady tent, handing out buckets and accepting toonies with a smile. Buckets do not sell like hotcakes. Sure, some people see them, want them, but most have to be “hard sold” at carnival barker pitch. That’s a lot of work on the fuel of one corn dog. Corn dog? The church lady food tents had lines going ’round their respective blocks. The corn dog booth had no lines. For a reason…
But back to the plot thread. At four p.m. we were promised a five p.m. cold beer, but at five I was to be dressed and practising to sing with the choir in another Plowing Match tent. With just a little time lag for the practice I might have had the beer and not cared with which hand I needed to manipulate my hat during “Mr. Sandman” (bring us a dream). I might have flipped the hat into the audience like a rock star. I might have had a voice this morning so I wouldn’t be silently typing on and on just now…
Oh, while I'm here I need to add a note about my unfairness to Oastler Lake, below: Our niece was regaling the family with the story of her canoe trip in late August and when she got to the stay-at-Oastler-Lake part and we were comparing notes, she said, "Wasn't that cool that the train tracks go right through the park?"

Back from the Bruce Trail with no bear tales for ya, but a snake tale (photo to follow when developed) and a bad magician tale. What shall I post first? The latter, I think. You’re not from Oastler Lake, right? Okay then, Oastler Lake Provincial Park is the WORST CAMPGROUND IN THE WORLD. After six days on the serene and rugged Bruce Peninsula we wanted (read “needed”) showers before we hit civilization at IMC Camp, Parry Sound – there were Torontonians there in Capri pants, so, yes, civilization. We easily booked a tent site on Saturday of the Labour Day weekend (hmmm…) for Oastler’s night life. Trains went through every hour or so in the wee hours, whistling and howling and screeching brakes, bush planes took off, motorboats roared, and, worst of all, a bad magician was giving a show on the hill above our tent ("Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, and Genders and Generations I haven't mentioned..."). Maybe he wasn’t bad. Maybe he was Houdini and I couldn’t hear the clapping and ooos and ahhhs for the howly trains. There was trainscreech-absence enough, however, for him to fill with un-ahhhed patter. Sleeping bag over the head didn't help. Oh for that nice quiet trail with the nice quiet bears and the nice quiet snakes. But there were showers. And we covered ourselves over with biodegradable camp soap for that. (No soap allowed in the lakes on the trail – rogue bears might take the mounds of it that collect on the shore and fashion fake moustaches and goatees for themselves, terrifying hikers.)

I must tell you about the wayzgoose when I get back. It had Michael Ondaatje in it! In the meantime, I'm packing to hike with hubby in the wilds of the Bruce Penninsula for a week. Dehydrated food, extra socks, two-(skinny)man tent, massassauga rattlers and bears. Should we have invited you? There will be better photos for the album upon our return.

You may get a word in edgewise now. And find those hidden archives if you so desire. I mucked about with the template to put in a guestbook and republish the archives. I say this as if I'm a code-writing expert, but no. It involved clicking only. Bravenet is a wonderful help. (By this I mean it does all the work for free - that's a *wonderful help.*) I did it during an electrical storm, though, so that makes me *intrepid.* Have fun with the guestbook. You know, a friend pointed out the other day that I'm using the word *wonky* frequently -- you know how you just seem to settle on a word and use it to death? -- but I think I'm using *mucked* as in *mucked about* too much. Maybe *you know* too, after rereading this.